Syracuse football QB Ryan Nassib produced big play with his feet during victory over Pitt

Syracuse football quarterback Ryan Nassib scrambles out of the pocket during Friday's 14-13 victory over Pittsburgh in the Carrier Dome.Frank Ordoñez / The Post-Standard

Syracuse, NY -- Syracuse football quarterback Ryan Nassib had his poorest outing of the season during Friday night’s 14-13 victory over Pittsburgh in the Carrier Dome, completing 19 of 30 passes (.633) for 185 yards and no touchdowns with one interception. Pitt has been a tough foe Nassib, a Philadelphia area native. In four games against the Panthers during his Orange career he threw only two TD passes and six interceptions.

“We were ready to go,” Nassib said afterward. “We had two weeks to prepare for this. We were just ready to go. We were anxious to get out there and start playing. We kept that intensity up the whole game but we might have been too intense, and that kind of was a little bit of our downfall.”

Syracuse (2-3, 1-0 Big East), which travels to Rutgers (5-0, 1-0) at noon Saturday, produced a season-low 305 yards of offense and struggled mightily in the second half to get anything going. Yet, the offense was able to run off the final 4 minutes, 52 seconds to preserve the victory, and Nassib played a key role – with his feet.

Starting the drive from its 20-yard line, the Orange quickly made one first down to the 33 on two Jerome Smith runs. Two subsequent runs by Prince-Tyson Gulley produced only four yards, though, and SU was faced with a critical third-and-six from the 37. He dropped back to pass and was looking for Marcus Sales in the slot, but Sales got hung up at the line of scrimmage by a Pitt defender and could not break free. Nassib brought the ball down and scrambled eight yards to the 45 for a first down.

From that point Pitt was forced to use its timeouts and SU brought in its new goal-line offense to maintain possession and run out the clock. Nassib, who has been asked to run the ball some this season in the zone read facet of the offense and has looked tentative at times doing it, ran with much more authority against the Panthers, gaining 22 yards on six carries (he was sacked twice for minus-8 yards, which gave him an official line score of eight carries for 14 yards). None of his runs was more important than that critical third-down scramble.